Cake brings 'Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle' to Ives

Erik Ofgang, Contributing Writer

Published 5:53 pm, Tuesday, July 13, 2010

John McCrea -- the lead singer of the alternative rock band Cake -- isn't exactly sure how he developed his distinctive half-singing, half-rapping style, but he thinks it might have been an unconscious attempt to fuse the many different genres he enjoys.

"I'm a midpoint between opera and rap," he said, after thinking about it for a moment.

McCrea's voice can be heard on the band's hits, which include "Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle," "The Distance," and "Never There."

Cake, which formed in the early 1990s, is back on tour this summer and will be taking the stage at Ives Concert Park Thursday night. The group also will return to the state for a Sept. 17 gig at Toad's Place in New Haven.

During a recent phone interview from his home in Oakland, Calif., McCrea talked about how the band's latest CD is 100 percent solar and why birthday cake was not the inspiration for the group's name.

Q: How did the band form?

A: The band formed in Sacramento, Calif., during a time of very, very cheap rent in the downtown area. That allowed me and others to devote a lot of time to playing music and not so much time to paying rent. It was a really great time for the city -- for artists and musicians and degenerates, in general. People were able to work a lot of hours at their craft or their art and not so many hours busing tables or driving a truck.

Q: How did you guys come up with the name?

A: We liked the phonetic punch of the name. We weren't thinking of Marie Antoinette or birthday cakes, we were more thinking of the word as a verb, so to cake dried tomato onto your corduroy pants. It was more thinking of the word cake as a buildup. By the same token, people will take it and believe what they want to believe, (but) on our rider we request no birthday cake imagery, just because that's going too far. That gets pretty old.

Q: What's the songwriting process like for you guys?

A: I just tend to write songs all the time, probably 95 percent of them never get completed and the 5 percent that get completed I bring to the band. And we musically collaborate a lot on most songs. On the upcoming album especially, it's become much more democratic. People come up with different arrangements and some of them are good and some of them aren't good. We keep trying and sometimes we get it and sometimes we don't.

Q: Can you tell me a little about the new album coming out in January?

A: Well, it's finished. We recorded it at our 100 percent solar-powered studio in Sacramento, Calif. We rehearsed and recorded and mixed it all using solar panels. As the value of recorded music descends into nothing, we get a little check from our public utility in Sacramento every month for $25 or so for the extra electricity that we feed into the grid, so we're getting rich off of that. If we don't make money on our music anymore, we always have that.